Rowan Renee: Troubling Archives: Interpreting and Transforming the Johns Committee’s Records of Persecution

For the first of two events to accompany Rowan Renee’s exhibition at Smack Mellon, Airport Beach, Renee will host a virtual conversation with scholar Stacy Braukman about her research into the Johns Committee—an investigation committee established by the Florida legislature in 1956 to investigate the “subversive” activities of the civil rights movement, homosexuality and communist political groups. Together, they will discuss Braukmans’s work linking the McCarthy Era to the present through the still-unfolding conservative political agenda that has grouped Southern white anxieties around race, sexuality, and political leftism. Through their different practices as artist and scholar, Renee and Braukman will explore their relationship to archival material as representative of communities that they are both part and peripheral to, addressing the risks and limits on artistic interpretation.